At Celia Otter's Funeral

Celia Otter

SCORES of people, neighbours, family, friends, fellow ramblers and comrade anarchists  attended Celia Otter's funeral at Westhope Green Burial site at East Westhope in Shropshire yesterday.    She died on New Year's day at Lightmoor View Nursing Home after experiencing a recurring brain tumour.

The service was Humanist, but it was performed in a small medieval church.  The graveyard fell into disuse in the 13th Century, yet the Church continued to be in use until the 18th Century.   Both it and the nearby Westhope College are part of a Quaker charity, and the graveyard was opened up as a green cemetery around 20 years ago; when Celia bought a plot on the burial site.  Memorial donations given yesterday went to Celia's favourite Charity:  the International Animal Rescue.

First impressions at the nearby railway station of Craven Arms were that it was not a very romantic place, nor was it improved when I met Martin Gilbert from Cumbria in a cafe on the main road inside Tommy Tuffin's supermarket.  This all changed as our taxi sped into the green Shropshire countryside which Celia so loved, and we strode up to the small church were the door was opened by the celebrant, Sue Faulder. 

Tributes followed and the music of Bach's 'Sheep may safely graze' played as tears fell.  Celia taught in London, and later lived in Oxford where Celia and Laurens' daughter, Fiona, was born.  A schoolfriend, Anthea Nex, who knew Celia when she was at school when they were both 13-years-old, spoke first of their experiences in Portsmouth, and of their cycling trips to Europe.  Celia we were told was both popular and forthright.

It was in London that she met the man who was to become her husband, Laurens Otter, during their activities in the campaign against nuclear weapons at the beginning of the 1960s.  Celia was later to gain a prison record for these activities which included civil disobedience against the bomb.  Martin Gilbert told me that she and Laurens attended the founding of the new British Anarchist Federation in Bristol in 1963. 

Andrea Burden, who knew Celia as a teacher in Shropshire, had met her in 1978 and worked with her.  Andrea told us that Celia had a policy of never excluding a pupil.  In the 1990s, Celia taught a Brookside school in Wellington, where she was head of school for maladjusted children.  John Latter, a local man who walker who walked his dog near Celia's home of College Farm spoke movingly of her later years.  Then the celebrant asked for others in the packed church to give their own thoughts on Celia.  Friends of Celia like the anarchist and feminist Rachel Whitaker, Martin Gilbert, and many others spoke following the poem 'Finis' by Walter Savage Landor. 

I thought about it, but did not dare comment on the timing of Celia's death on New Year's Day, so close in fact to that of one of her favourite comedians, John Fortune, who died on New Year's Eve.

Funeral of Celia Otter

CELIA Otter's funeral service will be held at Westhope Green Burial site at 12.00 on Thursday 16th January. There will be a collection plate for International Animal Rescue. Afterwards refreshments will be provided at Westhope college which is close by.

Celia Otter's New Year Death

Authentic Anarchist Activist from the 1960s Sadly Succumbs to Deadly Disease

CELIA Otter born 14th, October 1935 - Died 1st, January 2014: 

CELIA Otter, libertarian, peace activist and long-term supporter of the Northern Anarchist Network (NAN), died on New Year's Day after a long period fighting off the consequences of a brain tumour that developed some years ago.  She had been linked to the anarchist and peace movement since the 1960s, when she was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons at Holy Lock and later in the Committee of 100.  She lived for many years in Wellington, Shropshire where her father died several years ago.  Her home, a former farm house, to me resembled something which the National Trust might welcome as a treasure, and with its small orchard of fruit trees husbanded by Celia it was always a pleasure for me to spend some time stopping over-night with the Otter family. 

 

Celia came out of that confident tradition of left-wing activists of the 1960s, who were not afraid to identify themselves as activists in the libertarian political sphere.  It was in Freedom (the then weekly anarchist newspaper) that Colin Ward wrote:

'For anarchists the problem of the 1960s is simply that of how to put anarchism back into the intellectual bloodstream, into the field of ideas which are taken seriously.' 

In the 1960s David Goodway reports (see his Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow) sales of Freedom varied between 2,000 and 3,000;  today's print order for Freedom has recently been given as 300 which shows how political anarchism has declined in its influence in this country. 

 

Thus Celia Otter's political origins dated from a time in the 1960s when anarchism, according to intellectuals like Colin Ward, appeared to be entering the life-blood of the social/political consciousness both on a political and intellectual level, and this was because anarchism and anarchists felt themselves to be part of a social movement:  the peace movement.  Celia had been arrested at Holy Lock during actions there and was also arrested during the protests and sit-downs of the Committee of 100.  By the 1970s though this peace movement had lost almost all of its impetus, and the English anarchists and libertarians adapted badly to the rise of industrial conflict of the decade leading up to the defeat of the miners in their strike of 1984/5.  At the same time the open honest civil disobedience of the peace activists and the peace movement, was being subverted by some anarchists, and a culture of anarchism that owed more to Machiavelli than Marx with groups, and individuals steeped in the school of political intrigue: thus we got the politics of the Angry Brigade, and culturally the Punks replaced the Hippies.

 

At the time that this was happening, Celia herself was working as head teacher at a school for maladjusted children.  But she did not just confine herself to house-keeping and her career; in later years she attended the Northern Anarchist Network meetings in Wellington, besides providing food and accommodation for those in attendance.  Over the years since 2003, when it founded, she was a consistent supporter of Northern Voices.  It is also reported that Celia took part in the founding of the animal liberation movement in this country.

 

Celia Otter was one of those English libertarians who were proud of their politics, straight-forward in their demeanour, and valiant in their conduct.   She is survived by her husband Laurens, one of the best known and most loved figures of English anarchism, and her daughter Fiona.